Saturday, March 26, 2011

Mad Science and reading list


I am looking out at a serious snow situation. Coming down, sure, but there's also that 28 mph wind that may get up to 40 during the day. Sort of like last night when I was driving up to Kirkwood at 11 pm and the wind was blowing snow off of the drifts and whiting out my world for from one to several seconds, not a long time unless you are driving and there are these other large exoskeletal cyborgs tooling down the road.

And I'm thinking of how it was to wake up to snow, be in a very warm and cozy bed, and look for reading material (I'd cleverly put my cyborg books enough Over There that they were going to involve a cold crawl, and I'd nixed that idea in favor of Staying Under the Blankets. And lo and behold, the Wired magazine (March 2011) I'd seen previously (and which had suffered a reasonably traumatic tea spill a few weeks ago) was within arms reach. And after I'd done my New Yorker strategy (start from the back, troll for interesting images, don't commit to the sometimes imposing Table of Contents) I came across a set of so called Mad Science sidebars. And of course, they are seriously cyborgian. Here is one, and then really I have to get out there and ski.

Two images came to me as I read about chemist Zhenan Bao’s work with artificial skin: the Blade Runner scene where they make the high tech eyes, and the scene from Terminator where Reese explains that the cyborgs have real skin to fool the human detections systems (and the dogs, too; everyone knows dogs bark at the bad guys in movies, including Terminator in one suburban scene). And I thought of the prosthetic story by Damon Knight in which the guy kills the girl because he “holds” her with his prosthetic arm, which is made for lifting massive loads but not for cuddling.

Bao is making artificial skin sensitive using “pressure pixels” which are “made of stretchable, microscale organic field-effect transistors—building 40 years of advances in silicon chip design and nanofabrication into a flexible sheet.” Her skin uses a polymer called polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS, for short, which is pressed between flexible electrodes. When we measure pressure using pascals as a unit, this material can – theoretically, the article qualifies – both detect a housefly’s steps on the skin, and do this quickly enough to pick up each step in sequence. (The article doesn’t mention whether it could here the fly scream “Help me, help me!”).

What I found fascinating was the mention of uses, which unsurprisingly talks both about restoration of function and augmentation of human ability. The first list of uses includes sensitive prosthetic hands, artificial skin-graft material for burn victims, remote-control surgical tools with haptic feedback. But the second list goes beyond replicating skin:

“We could integrate any kind of function beyond what skin already has,” Bao says. How about chemical sensors—gunpowder-sensing gloves for enhanced TSA gropes, anyone? Or biological probes to detect infections at prosthetic limb attachment points? And, yes, the potential applications for telepresence sex are self-evident.

What I find fascinating is the way such science stories inevitably move from highly technical and slow advances, to the increasinbly wide range of uses such material might be put to. And often the exact same technology is restorative (which people often feel comfortable with) and augmenting (which often conjures up revulsion and fear and not always for bad reasons).

I’ll post on some of the other Mad Science cyborg elements - cyborg perennials to save the soil, cyborg bees to defeat parasites that are decimating bee populations) after I go hit the pow, as they say (who are they anyway? But clearly “they” are the cool ones, no doubt.)

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